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Wattpad Update

It’s been a while since I posted about my Wattpad experience. In part, that’s because it’s taken a while to decide whether posting on Wattpad was a positive experience and partly because I’ve been deep into the writing process for my next book, Rook. A couple excerpts are up on Wattpad if you’d like to take a look.

The novel I’m posting on Wattpad keeps plugging away gaining new readers every week, but not with the intensity that it saw at the beginning. Wattpad made some changes and now readers have to stay on the page longer before the system registers their view as a read. A couple of the installments of my book are so short that when I first read them, my read didn’t get counted. Now I’m making sure that each installment is a little longer to avoid that problem.

Overall, my impressions of Wattpad are mixed. Wattpad is an excellent reading platform for discovering new works and authors. Readers can easily switch between viewing a story on their computers and smartphones. It has a search engine that can find whatever type of read you enjoy and there is plenty of material to choose from, all free and much of it very well written. Wattpad has an exciting mix of developing and professional authors, fresh voices and some very cool stories.

The social part of Wattpad is home to wonderfully supportive community of readers and authors. Book clubs and boards provide plenty of opportunity to connect with other authors and the people I’ve met have all been positive, helpful and kind in their reviews and comments. I’d give the community an A+.

On the downside, from an author’s perspective, I have found it frustrating to deal with the inconsistencies and the problems with the interface. Many of those issues have been touched on in previous posts so I’ll not go into them here. It seems that the company is trying to make things better–kudos for that.

My original intent was to see if writing and publishing serially improved my writing. For the genre I write, a fantasy-thriller-romance mashup, the serial nature of Wattpad makes a lot of sense. I caught myself tweaking the endings of each scene I posted to make the hook as strong as possible going into the next installment. The beginnings also sometimes needed a minor change to bring the reader back into the story, keeping in mind that the installments are each posted several days apart (although some readers read straight through the existing posted content). These considerations probably contributed to a stronger story overall. And it’s been a blast to read the reader reactions to each scene, which again points to the wonderful community on Wattpad. For that reason more than any other, I’d recommend it for authors who don’t mind posting some of their work for free.

As for the following on Wattpad translating to sales on other platforms, my experience is that the crossover is minimal. The plus side to that is I’m not losing sales from paid platforms because a version of the story is free on Wattpad. And who knows, maybe some of the readers on Wattpad will enjoy Rosamond Eternal enough to purchase Rook.

I will continue to post installments to the Wattpad version of The Jaguar Key, Rosamond Eternal with occasional updates here. If you haven’t been on Wattpad yet, it only takes a couple seconds to make an account and access a world of free and interesting stories. Thanks for reading!